Just Saying ‘No’

A Zimbabwean high court judge has ruled that a law prohibiting abortion access for girls under the age of 18 and women raped by their husbands is unconstitutional, a landmark ruling for the conservative and struggling country, the Associated Press reported.

High Court Judge Maxwell Takuva issued a ruling on Nov. 22, which was made public last week, saying that since Zimbabwe’s laws criminalize marital rape and sex with minors, victims should have the lawful right to abortion if they become pregnant.

“There is no doubt that it is torture, cruel, and degrading treatment for a child to carry another child, for a child to give birth to another child, or for a child to be forced to illegally abort because of cruel circumstances,” said Takuva.

Zimbabwe has had restrictive abortion laws that often lead women to seek out illegal abortions which in many cases turn fatal. Almost 80,000 unsafe abortions occur every year in the country of 15 million people, while thousands of others go unreported, the newswire wrote.

Legal abortions have previously been allowed in Zimbabwe only if the pregnancy endangers the life of the mother if there is a risk of a physical or mental birth defect, or in cases of unlawful sex such as incest.

In September, Zimbabwe criminalized sex with those under the age of 18, but the highly restrictive Termination of Pregnancy Act still denied abortion services to minors before the ruling. The current case, brought by a women’s rights group, has faced no governmental opposition but still needs to be approved by Zimbabwe’s Supreme Court to take effect as law.

Judge Takuva also said that providing access to safe abortions for teenage girls “is significant in light of the massive instances of teenage pregnancies in Zimbabwe, and consequently illegal teen abortions and teenage mortalities.”

About one in four females becomes pregnant between the ages of 10 and 19 in Zimbabwe due to the lax enforcement of laws protecting young girls, cultural and religious practices, and widespread poverty that makes it hard to access contraceptives and clinics.

In this deeply conservative country, one in three females is married before the age of 18. In cases of underage sex and unplanned pregnancies, families and officials try “to sweep the cases under the carpet or … force marriages on the minor,” police spokesman Paul Nyathi told the newswire.